Thoughts, Findings, and Rants…

Today’s Readings

Great (albeit simple, which is actually part of what makes it great!) example of sort-order progressive enhancement from JeremyKeith, starting with select elements and enhancing with nifty drag-and-drop functionality, while still using the update process from the non-drag-and-drop version…

The future of loading CSS by JakeArchibald demonstrates a progressive approach to page rendering, allowing for improved perceived page load speeds, and pretty ideally designed for modular design & development…

Then here is an interesting follow-up from Jake. As Jake says, not practical, and probably shouldn’t even be done, but it’s always interesting to push envelopes and see how various options affect things.

Service Worker Precache is a module for generating a service worker that precaches resources. The module is designed for use with gulp or grunt build scripts, though it also provides a command-line interface. The module’s API provides methods for creating a service worker and saving the resulting code to a file.

Boy did this site performance article send me down a rabbit hole… Into Ilya’s presentation, into my repo, onto my dev server, and finally this site makes fair use of rel-prefetch. :-) My Analytics, at least for now, says that preconnect, prefetch, and prerender don’t make much sense for me, but it is something I will keep an eye on!

2 Responses to Today’s Readings

The first rule of Flexbox is if you talk too much about flexbox then people will think you cannot create anything without flexbox, nay, you cannot exist without flexbox.

This has already come to pass where I see the script kiddies of reddit think every solution to every problem resides with flex.

I have no problems with flex, myself, but I am in no rush to start using it. Not being in a rush to use it says something. It means you don’t need it to accomplish the same task with other CSS properties.

Of course, there are those that get excited about something new, and want to use it everywhere they can, but I think most Flexbox enthusiasts will be the first to say it is not for everything, and should only be used where it solves a problem better than the previous solution.

There is no question that floats and other positioning methods can do nearly everything you want to do, but there definitely are things that cannot be done with CSS, using a non-Flexbox method.

But in the end, developers should do what is best for their clients and their clients’ sites.